Liz Kuball Photography | Blog: September 2008

New L.A. photography blog

Photographer J. Wesley Brown has started a new blog dedicated to the L.A. photo scene. He just got off the ground with it Friday, but it promises to be a useful resource for anyone interested in photography in the area. If you have news about L.A. photo-related shows, lectures, or other events, shoot Wes an e-mail.

Labels: blogs, J. Wesley Brown, photographers, We Can Shoot Too

Our last hope of ending this country’s reputation as the assholes of the universe

Labels: actors, Barack Obama, politics, Sarah Silverman

Paul Newman, 1925–2008

“He was smilin’, smiling. . . . That’s right. You know, that, that . . . that Luke smile of his. He had it on his face right to the very end. Hell, if they didn't know it ’fore, they could tell right then that they weren’t e’er gonna beat him. That old Luke smile. Oh, Luke. He was some boy. Cool Hand Luke. Hell, he’s a natural-born world-shaker.”

They don’t make ’em more beautiful than this.

Labels: actors, Paul Newman

Gearon and Grannan and Soth, oh my!

Martin Schoeller is great and all, but check out this list of artists who have work up for auction, all to benefit the Obama campaign, as well as the Democratic National Committee and nonprofit organizations such as MoveOn.org. The auction launches October 1 and will run for one week.

If I come into a few grand in the next week, here are the three I’ll bid on.

via Hey, Hot Shot!

Labels: Barack Obama, Larry Sultan, Marc Asnin, Martin Schoeller, photographers, politics, prints, Todd Hido

Get a Martin Schoeller print and support Obama

via The Exposure Project

Labels: Barack Obama, Martin Schoeller, photographers, politics, prints

Tierney Gearon revisited

I was flipping through W magazine this morning before eating my Cheerios, and I saw that there was an article on the actress Dakota Fanning, who, I was surprised to learn, is now 14. I’m impressed by Fanning and others like her: actors who happen to be children, as opposed to child actors. It seems like they’ve found a loophole, a crack in the spacetime continuum or something—able to walk in the world of adults while remaining children, and enjoying all the benefits of both worlds. The article shows that well. So, too, does the photo by Tierney Gearon.

And that leads me to the real subject of this post. Gearon is, to my mind, the real deal. I first heard about her when the film Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project came out, and I saw the film and heard her speak at UCSB in February. The film primarily documents Gearon as she photographs her children and her manic-depressive, schizophrenic mother. There were aspects of it I loved, parts of it that I found frightening and disturbing, too. The Q&A afterward was awkward—a combination of Gearon’s own demeanor (she seemed a bit manic, all over the place, hard to follow) and the audience (a woman in front of me audibly said, “That’s disgusting!” two or three times during the film, and several people in the audience seemed not to get her photos of her children).

The more time has passed, though, the more my respect for Gearon has grown, and the more I recognize the beauty in her work. I think of her and the film and her photos often, and isn’t that what it’s all about? My sister Cara and I have talked about The Mother Project more than once—the complexities of photographing your family in that way, what it is to be a mother, our feelings about our own mother and ourselves as daughters. It’s powerful stuff. I think I’m going to go order the DVD and watch it again. I see connections between Gearon and The Wire that I’m still trying to sort out.

Labels: actors, Dakota Fanning, films, photographers, The Wire, Tierney Gearon, TV

The Wire

For the past month or so, S. and I have been watching DVDs of The Wire. We’re almost done with Season 3, and with only two seasons left to go, I’m already dreading the end of the series. I can’t say enough good things about it, can’t possibly come up with the words to tell you how fucking incredible this show is. But if you haven’t seen it, and you can get the DVDs, do. It’s beautiful and painful and so real it makes me want to move to Baltimore and find these people, until I realize they’re only on TV.

Here’s a scene from the episode we just watched. I don’t want to say anything about who these people are or what the significance of it is, in case you haven’t seen the show yet. They’re friends. That’s all you need to know.

Labels: S., The Wire, TV

America: The Gift Shop

I first became aware of Phillip Toledano’s work through Rachel Hulin on the now-defunct Shoot! The Blog. (If you haven’t seen Toledano’s project Days with My Father, be sure to check that out.) I absolutely love his new site, America: The Gift Shop. He says this, in part, about it: “Once the sugar coating of the ordinary dissolves, we are left with the hard and uncomfortable truth about where we’ve been as a nation. We buy souvenirs at the end of a trip, to remind ourselves of the experience. What do we have to remind us of the events of the last eight years?” This project is Toledano’s answer.

via Rachel Hulin

Labels: blogs, Phillip Toledano, photographers, politics, Rachel Hulin, Shoot The Blog

Old friends

Coming out of a long, couple months of seven-day workweeks—this is the last work weekend. And, starting at the end of October, I’ve even scheduled myself to only work four days a week, so if anything unexpected comes up, I can handle it.

You know how, when it’s been a long time since you’ve seen an old friend, you spend the first few minutes that you’re together just taking it all in, staring at her when she’s talking and thinking, “Right, that’s her, that’s how she looks and sounds and acts”? That’s what it’ll be like when I pick up my camera again. Because it’s been far, far too long.

Labels: day job

My vote: More of the truth, less of Jill Greenberg

via Cara Phillips

Labels: Barack Obama, Jill Greenberg, photographers, politics

Graham Miller

I’ve been obsessing over the photo at the top of the Flak Photo home page (the fourth one below) for a while now, and I finally e-mailed Andy Adams to find out who was behind it. Turns out it’s Australian photographer Graham Miller, whose project Suburban Splendour is stunningly beautiful. Graham was kind enough to e-mail me some photos to use in this post, just before heading out for the Pingyao International Photography Festival, where a selection of his work is being shown. You can also find him in Hijacked, Volume 1: Australia and America. Meanwhile, you can find me swimming in these images.

Labels: Andy Adams, Flak Photo, Graham Miller, magazines, photographers

Break out the Rubik’s Cube, baby

Labels: Barack Obama, politics

Enough

There is simply too much at stake to leave it to someone else. Yes, of course, do your part and vote—that should go without saying. But don’t let your involvement in this process start and end in the voting booth. We have less than two months to go and, with nothing of substance to stand on, the Republicans are distorting people’s words, crying, “Sexism!” anytime someone mentions lipstick let alone dares to question Sarah Palin’s record, trying to tell us to vote for who we “like,” as if electing a president is akin to choosing a homecoming king or queen. We are better than this, people. I know we are.

So for my part, I want a president who doesn’t just put a woman on the ticket to win women’s votes; I want a president who, through every decision he makes, values a woman’s right to choose what to do with her own body. I want a president who doesn’t talk out of one side of his mouth about putting country first, and then chooses a running mate putting politics first. I want a president who has read great books, not one who chooses a running mate who wants to ban them. I want a president who values sex education over abstinence education. I want a president who cares about the environment more than oil. I want a president who will restore our country’s standing in the world through diplomacy and leadership, not try to do so through the brute force of a playground bully.

As Barack Obama says, enough. Enough of this petty bickering. Enough of trying to pit us against each other. Enough of appealing to the worst in us rather than inspiring the best in us. Enough.

Go here and sign up to volunteer. Then go to my.barackobama.com and create an account. Sign up to make phone calls, register people to vote, go door to door in your neighborhood, road-trip to neighboring swing states to campaign for Barack. . . . Do what you can, and then do more. This is too important not to.

Labels: Barack Obama, politics

Day at a time, I suppose

Where I am right now—in terms of my frame of mind—is the result of influences that read like the recipe for school-cafeteria goulash. The stock, the foundation of this recipe, is all about 2007 being a year of intense, exponential growth for me photographically. So much happened, in such a short period of time, that I wrote at the end of the year about it having felt longer than 12 months, and it did. So with that as the foundation, it’d be pretty hard for 2008 to come close. And so far, it hasn’t. Throw in some Dara Torres and Michael Phelps, some good old-fashioned politics, and a heaping dose of my recent viewing of The Wire, and that’s where I’m at. An intense passion for things as they are, for complex characters, for beauty in unlikely places, for never giving up and turning naysayers into fuel for the fire.

A project I’ve been dancing around for six months or so crystallized for me in two moments last week: a phone call with my mother in which I described where I live, and a walk down the street with Boo, where what I saw before me—the person, the car, the light, the scene—cut right to the heart of this place. And suddenly I knew what the project was about, why I was interested in it, what I was looking for.

I’m starting to see a path in the woods, starting to see where I want to go, and it’s making sense in a way that—despite all the joy that was 2007—I didn’t feel last year. It’s not as easy as all that, not as simple. But I think there’s more substance to it, more staying power. It’ll stick to the ribs.

Labels: athletes, Boo Radley, Dara Torres, dogs, Michael Phelps, The Wire, TV

Fiona Aboud: Sikhs in America

Photographer Fiona Aboud e-mailed me this morning to ask for my vote on her Blurb photo book, Sikhs in America, which she entered in the Photography.Book.Now contest. As you may have heard, they’re having a People’s Choice Award, and you only get one vote. I have friends in this contest, people whose work I respect and admire, and I hadn’t voted yet because I wanted to really look through the books and use my vote wisely. When I got Fiona’s e-mail and looked at her book preview (available here), I knew this was the book I wanted to vote for, and I hope you will, too. (To vote for her book, just go here and click the big orange button.)

Good luck, Fiona!

Labels: Fiona Aboud, photographers

Death race

This post from Rachel Hulin over at Shoot! The Blog was just too damn good not to get a shot of.

Labels: blogs, politics, Rachel Hulin, Shoot The Blog

Shop for me: Christian Patterson’s Sound Affects

If you’re feeling generous, feel free to buy me a copy of Christian Patterson’s Sound Affects from photo-eye (signed, please—I’m willing to wait). The price is just a bit beyond my reach right now, but I promise I’ll enjoy it.

Labels: books, Christian Patterson, photographers, shop for me

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Monday, September 29, 2008

New L.A. photography blog

Our last hope of ending this country’s reputation as the assholes of the universe

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Paul Newman, 1925–2008

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Gearon and Grannan and Soth, oh my!

Get a Martin Schoeller print and support Obama

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Tierney Gearon revisited

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

The Wire

Monday, September 22, 2008

America: The Gift Shop

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Old friends

Monday, September 15, 2008

My vote: More of the truth, less of Jill Greenberg

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Graham Miller

Friday, September 12, 2008

Break out the Rubik’s Cube, baby

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Enough

Saturday, September 06, 2008

Day at a time, I suppose

Fiona Aboud: Sikhs in America

Thursday, September 04, 2008

Death race

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Shop for me: Christian Patterson’s Sound Affects

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